Tuesday, 30 September 2014

Migration for employment is an unequal process. Within this reality, migrating communities continue to find social space that allows them to have one foot in the destination country even while keeping the other in their homeland. ... MORE ...

Tuesday, 17 June 2014

It is a good idea to publish books around the time of national elections. They catch readers’ attention. Especially so during the recent fiercely fought national elections when many topical titles appeared on the bookshelves in the past months. ...MORE ...

Wednesday, 7 May 2014

Turn on any television channel and you
will think that India is going through bipolar national elections. It is like a
boxing match, being fought in proxy. In one corner is one man, Narendra
Modi, ably represented by whoever his spokesperson is in the studio that
evening. In the other corner is the Gandhi family, again represented by an
articulate spokesperson.

Somewhere the richness and colour of the
regional parties that became the integral part of Indian polity since 1996
seems to be missing in the predominant media representation of these elections.
Conspicuous by their near-absence in the media coverage in this year’s
elections are dramatis personae such
as Lalu Prasad Yadav, Mayawati, Nitish Kumar, Navin Patnaik, M. Karunanidhi,
etc. Mamata Banerjee, Chandrababu Naidu and Omar Abdullah make occasional
appearance.

Cut back to the period between 1995 and
1998, when the country was preparing for the 1996 general elections and also
when the United Front Government faced many trust motions in Parliament. The
television screens were full of leaders from regional political parties.

Plantations such as this cardamom estate in Idukki district have been in the eye of a political storm in the recent months [Pic: Varun Warrier]

A trend towards bipolarity has its
implications for environmental decisions in an ecosystem-diverse country like
India. Take for instance the case of the mid-altitude plateaus of Kerala,
represented by Idukki and Wayanad districts, which have been in the news during
the run-up to these elections. At an average altitude between 800 and 1000
metres, these plateaus were malaria-prone regions. As with the Gudalur plateau in
Tamil Nadu contiguous to Wayanad, these plateaus were only sparsely populated
till the 1940s. The influx of settlers came when there was effective medical
cure for malaria (1).

Those who initially went to settle in
these plateaus were from communities that were landless and had the daring to
go to dangerous terrains. While the landed gentry stayed back in the plains,
and boasted about temple festivals and caparisoned elephants, the landless
settlers braved the wild elephant herds and cultivated every inch of land they
could lay their hands on. The women tended the farms, protected the children
from wild animals while the men trekked for days to the nearest market town to
sell what the family produced.

When this settler community gets slapped
with orders emerging from the Kasturirangan Committee limiting their
activities, it protests (2). While one can argue on the conservation versus livelihoods debate,
the fact remains that if a representative has to take these issues effectively
to the Parliament it has to be someone who is from the region and knows its
history and ecology. He or she needs a political agenda that is tailor-made to
represent the interests of the region, and not one that has been averaged out
for the entire country. And this is where regional parties score over omnibus
national parties.

The 1996 general elections and the years
of the United Front Government was the period when regionalism and federalism
bloomed in the country. By this time the results from two socio-economic processes
initiated between 1989 and 1991 were maturing. As part of the economic
liberalisation there was a focus on the middle class as a consumer base for the
goods and services. This created a new kind of economic aspiration for a wider
group of people. This bolstered the aspirations for development and growth from
caste and region-based consolidations that were born after the implementation
of the Mandal Committee report in 1989 (3).

Happening in parallel with this was a
coming together of local environmental movements to demand greater
accountability from the electoral candidates in select constituencies. A group
of organisations, led by Narmada Bachao Andolan, established the National Alliance
of People’s Movement (NAPM), with an aim of bringing people’s issues into the
agenda of the 1996 elections (4). Similarly, another group of environmental organisations formed a
network called the Jan Vikas Andolan to publicly question candidates on their
environmental concerns (5).

However, it is not the case that regional
parties are more environment friendly than the national ones. In fact, the
trend in the mid 1990s was that each of the regional parties was pushing for
development projects in their regions, oftentimes unmindful of incorporating
environmental safeguards.

The difference is that the feedback loops
between the people and the policymakers are shorter with regional parties. So
when people ask for development or conservation that is location or
ecosystem-specific they can communicate and get action for their needs quickly
and effectively. The accountability for the policy maker becomes that much
sharper. For instance, Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam party, who
focussed on the urban areas at the cost of the larger rural population, has had
to sit out for a decade.

At a local level, the perceived dichotomy
between development and conservation also disappears. For the
demarcation of the ecologically sensitive area (ESA) the Western Ghats Ecology
Expert Panel (Madhav Gadgil Committee) had recommended consultations through
the local bodies under the Panchayats and Biodiversity Acts (6). The High Level Working Group on Western Ghats (Kasturirangan
Committee), which was tasked to work out the modalities for implementing the
earlier committee’s recommendations, overlooked this and went through marking
the ESAs using satellite imagery (7). And this is causing the controversy in the hill districts.

So much so that the Ministry of
Environment and Forests (MoEF) had to make amendments to its 13 October 2013
notification, accepting the recommendations of the Kasturirangan Committee that
declared 37% area of the Western Ghats as an ESA where development activities
are restricted.

Through an office memorandum dated 20
December 2013, MoEF stated that the boundary of the ESA and the regulatory
regime would be finalised after obtaining the views of the stakeholders and
state governments. MoEF assured that the recommendations will not cause
restrictions to any normal activities related to plantations and agriculture; and
that the restrictions listed in the notification will apply only to new and
expansion projects, and not to the existing ones.

The Kasturirangan Committee reportedly used
higher resolution satellite imagery than the Gadgil Committee while demarcating
the ESA. However, technical minutiae cannot replace a broad-based democratic
process that would have been more acceptable to the people on the ground.

So when the media represents these
elections as bipolar, what is being lost is the space that accommodates the
various nuances of development and environment discussions in the country.

It could be possible that the media is
reading the situation wrong or over-presenting bipolarity. In the theatre of
talk shows and televised shouting matches, bipolarity adds drama.

There is reality and there is the media’s
perception of the reality. The country today has access only to the media’s
perception of reality. Will the real picture be as bipolar as what is being
made out will be clear on May 16.

_______________________

1.Adams
T. Gudalur: A community at the crossroads. In: Hockings P, editor. Blue
Mountains: The ethnography and biogeography of a South Indian region: Oxford
University Press; 1989.

Monday, 21 April 2014

In 1959, the Times of India had a special
publication to celebrate Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s 70th birth year. The
Indo-China war had not happened and Nehru’s popularity had not taken the
nosedive. He had been in power for 12 years, long enough to assess his
governance.

The thick volume – A study of Nehru (1) – was edited by Rafiq Zakaria, then a columnist with Times of India,
and later a Member of Parliament and minister in the Maharastra Government.
Zakaria had collected and edited essays on Nehru from leaders across political
and civil life in India and across the world. Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel
Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Clement Atlee, Louis Mountbatten, S. Radhakrishnan,
E.M.S Namboodiripad, S.A. Dange and R.K. Laxman were among those who
contributed to the volume. Some essays praised Nehru, a few others ran him down
and there were some that kept the balance.

Accumulating
urban waste is high on the list of environment problems for the young voter.

The essays in the volume gave Nehru depth
and life. Whether supporting or pillorying him, they argued cogently, with clarity
of thought and public purpose rarely seen in the present times.

We are a country of argumentative people
and right now we are going through a period when our arguments have reached
their crescendo. More than half the country’s voters have exercised their
franchise, but those remaining to vote can make a serious impact. There is an
aggression and desperation simultaneously as parties go for the kill.

Elections 2014 has a strong component to
the arguments, discussions and debates from young voters. Of the total of 814.5
million about 100 million (2) are casting their votes for the first time. And among these
first-timers, 23.6 million have just turned 18 years of age. The voters
represent the demographic profile of the population, and according to the 2011
census 28.9% of the population is between 18 and 35 years of age (3), emphasising the strong involvement of young voters this year.

What is the environmental consciousness
of these young voters and how is it likely to affect their voting? Even the
oldest in the 18 to 35 age group would have just been born around the end of
the 1970s when the landmark controversy of modern Indian environmental history
– over the construction of a dam for a hydro-electric project flooding the
Silent Valley rainforest in Kerala – was raging.

They would have been too young to register
the impact of the Bhopal gas leak in 1984, or the sit-in by the anti-Narmada
Dam movement at Ferkuva in 1990-91. Essentially the environment consciousness
of this group would have become active after the economic liberalisation was
launched in the country in 1991.

Environmental understanding for this
generation that has had its awakening in the post-liberalised India is
different from that of the earlier generations. In the first half of the 1990s there
was a transition in the manner in which people thought about the environment
and how they acted to protect it.

Two decades ago, when the activists of
the Narmada Bachao Andolan, led by Medha Patkar, marched to Ferkuva in the
Madhya Pradesh-Gujarat border, or when they sat along the banks of the Narmada
river braving the rising waters of the river repeating “doobenge par hatenge nahin” (we may drown but will not move), they
were pitting the moral strength of individuals against the might of the State.

The
same was true when Sundarlal Bahuguna sat in protest on the banks of the
Bhagirathi river in Tehri Garhwal in the present-day Uttarakhand.

The equation, as perceived then, was that
industrial capital and the State were two different entities, but was coalescing
to take away people’s access to their natural resources. The citizen had to
protest this with the State.

After the impact of the economic
liberalisation started in the mid-1990s, the boundaries between capital and the
State blurred and it was difficult to pit the citizen’s moral strength against
an amorphous entity. The young lived and drew sustenance from the liberalised
economy, thus their lives were same (or they aspired for it to be same) as that
of their class enemies. Thus, the broad-brush protests of the anti-Narmada and anti-Tehri
dam movements became ineffective in dealing with environmental problems.

It was necessary to have specific,
targeted action. Thus by the second half of 1990s, like their counterparts in
the West, environment activists in India took to fighting legal cases,
campaigning through the media, lobbying with Parliamentarians and carrying out
e-mail campaigns. These were project-based environmental confrontations.

However, the romance of the protest
remained. The romance was revived when Anna Hazare sat on protest at Ramlila
Maidan in New Delhi in August 2011. The urban middle class youngster enjoyed
the novelty of protesting, but had to get back with his/her life after a few
days. And there were messages on Facebook: “Anna-ji
maan jayiye!” (please do agree, Anna). Fashionable protest is different
from protest to protect livelihoods.

The Hazare movement evolved into the Aam
Aadmi Party (AAP) and the novelty of the concept attracted the youth. Here was
an opportunity to fight the “corrupt politicians.” But when the dream party
resigned from the Delhi Government, some of its sheen was lost. There are
“murmurings” though, as social scientist Shiv Visvanathan points out (4), but these are from the livelihood protestors in regions such as
the Kolar gold mines in Karnataka.

Some of the sheen that the AAP lost in
the perception of the young voter has accrued to the BJP account. Development,
nationalism, growth, change, “Vikas
Purush”, etc., are the keywords that the BJP is using to tap into it.

In the glossary of environmental-civic
problems of these young voters there would be mention of urban garbage, sewage
problems, air pollution, pot-holed roads and inadequate public transport.
Unsafe municipal water supply may not appear, since water reaches homes in
plastic containers. Neither will there be a mention of the risk of climate
change for farmers.

These keywords are the ones playing out
on Twitter, Facebook and the television talk shows. The messages, however, are
disjointed and sporadic.

Unlike in the time of Nehru, there are
far too many messages in far too many media types communicated by far too many
people. Teasing out a narrative from all this has so far been near impossible
in this year’s elections.

Sunday, 13 April 2014

There is a kind of e-mail that does its
rounds of mailboxes frequently. It is a rather long one, extolling the virtues
of ancient Indian science and technology, and talking about the glory of
Aryabhata, Charaka and Sushruta.

From the tone and tenor of the e-mail it looks
as if its author is a person who in the present is feeling slighted (for
whatever reasons) and has to find strength by emphasizing the glorious past
from which his/her people evolved. Perhaps he or she is a non-resident Indian
in the US, for that is the community from which much cyber-nationalism emerges.

The
BJP claims that it will balance the needs of development and environment if voted to power.

The author of the e-mail is unknown but
the names of the authors for the 2014 election manifesto for the BJP(1) are known in the public domain. The preface of the manifesto starts
thus: “India is the most ancient civilization of the world and has always been
looked upon by the world as a land of wealth and wisdom. India has been
credited to have developed, apart from philosophy and mathematics, science and
technology of a very high order, which had attracted scholars from all over the
world. … India was respected for its flourishing economy, trade, commerce and
culture. It had an international outreach from Korea to Arabia, from Bamiyan to
Borobudur and beyond.”

There are a few subtexts in the BJP
manifesto. Its title – Ek Bharat shreshta
Bharat: Sabka saath, sabka vikas – defines the party’s vision of grandeur.
It pledges to build a “modern India” on the “best foundation” of “our own
culture” using “our own hands” and the “best material” of “our own
aspirations.”

“Our own aspirations” is the key phrase
here. It taps the feeling of frustration of the middle class and the wannabe
middle class of not being able to realise their aspirations due to poor
governance of the Congress-led government. And the BJP will rectify that
through an “open, transparent and
systems-based government” that will provide “pro-active, pro-people good governance.”

Interestingly, the
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) the third political entity with national ambitions, took
this very argument one step forward. For them the poor governance came from
“corrupt politicians.” The dampener for the BJP is the AAP focusing on the
corruption angle in its campaign.

The inability of
successive national governments to deliver on people’s aspirations is well
articulated in the manifesto: “Even after nearly seven decades of our
independence, the country has not been able to discover its innate vitality,
the sense of time and the will to act. … The present crisis is the result of
this confusion and disconnect from the seekings and sensibilities of the
people. This is worse confounded by the weak and spineless leadership of the
UPA Government.”

The problem about
painting the whole of post-Independence history with one brush is that it also
covers one term plus 13 months and 13 days of BJP-led governance. So the
manifesto builds in this caveat: “The beginning of the 21st century showed some
light under the NDA rule. India started being reckoned as an economic
superpower. The six-year rule of NDA had given the Nation many firsts, building
an image in the international community. However, many of the hopes, potentials
and projects have not been fully realized in the subsequent years. But after
2004, UPA came into power and the situation started worsening again. We missed
a historic national opportunity once more.”

Prima facie this begs the question that
if India was really shining between 1999 and 2004 then why did the voters
interrupt the dream run? At a deeper level, the question is what does it mean
for the environmental considerations of the country if the BJP were to come to
power at the Centre? The manifesto takes a two-pronged approach towards
environment – direct and indirect.

The promises are direct. It promises to
take the idea of sustainability and climate change mitigation initiatives
seriously and work with the global community. The government will encourage
cleaner production; promote cleaner fuel; launch an integrated public transport
project; promote pro-active carbon credit (sic); conduct ecological audit of
projects and pollution indexing of urban centres; use wastelands for social
forestry; produce guidelines for constructing green buildings; promote human
capacity building in environmental technologies; establish fool proof
mechanisms for the protection and preservation of wildlife; encourage and
incentivise innovative garbage management practices; and clean rivers starting
with the Ganga.

There is mention of a National Mission on
the Himalayas and the creation of a Himalayan Sustainability Fund. The BJP government
“will set in place national policies on critical natural resources like coal,
minerals, spectrum, etc., spelling out in black and white how much should be
utilised in what time and pace.” Cultural values and thorium reserves will be
considered before deciding on the Sethu Samudram project in the Palk
Strait.

In terms of sheer number of environmental
promises the BJP manifesto beats the document from the Congress (even if one
were to debate whether spectrum is a natural resource). But this is because the
BJP has one benefit over the Congress – its statements in the manifesto cannot
be immediately verified against performance. Ten years is a long time to be out
of power at the Centre, and extrapolating BJP governments’ performance in
Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh against a national context
is not exactly a valid comparison.

However, in real terms it is the indirect
references to environmental concerns that are more important. Especially so
since the BJP is keen to take India to its historical greatness.

“We should no longer remain a market for
the global industry,” emphasises the manifesto. “Rather, we should become a
global manufacturing hub.” There would a conducive and enabling environment for
doing business which will cut down the red tape, simplify procedures and remove
the bottlenecks. The government will ensure logistic infrastructure, including
stable power.

“Our attempt will be to move towards a
single-window system of clearances both at the Centre and the states through a
hub-spoke model.” The Centre and the states will work in coordination for
giving clearances to mega projects. “Decision making on environment clearances
will be made transparent as well as time-bound.” The government will “frame the
environment laws in a manner that provides no scope for confusion and will lead
to speedy clearance of proposals without delay.”

The play of words is interesting. The
single window of the BJP is similar to the National Enviornmental Appraisal and
Monitoring Authority articulated in the Congress manifesto. At least the
Congress believes in creating a body specifically for looking at environmental
issues, whereas the single window envisaged by the BJP is for giving clearance
for the project and not necessarily to look at the environmental issues.
Further, even the environment laws can be rewritten to avoid confusion and lead
to speedy clearance.

Both the BJP and Congress are in a hurry.
But only the BJP knows where to reach – the glorious India of the past “whose
prosperity held the world in thrall.”

Sunday, 30 March 2014

In mid 1990s, I attended an impromptu
press conference addressed by Manmohan Singh at the Central Leather Research
Institute (CLRI), Chennai. As the finance minister spoke, we huddled closer to
hear him. The economic liberalisation was still in its early stages, and Singh
said that once the economy starts to grow at 7% there would be enough resources to
invest in the social, environment and health sectors.

A few days ago the Indian National
Congress published the report card for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA),
and the party’s promissory note for the future five years. The manifesto states
that it is a document drawn up after a series of consultations with different
stakeholders “to get their inputs on India’s future growth, development and
inclusion agenda.” Election manifestoes need lofty statements, and this one
says, “We believe in a simple truth: equity and opportunity for all.”

The results of the coming elections
will show what communities think of the UPA’s environmental policies

The economic growth in the past 10 years
had a certain kind of inclusiveness about it. The growth of the service sector
and its incessant need for manpower opened employment opportunities for young
graduates in the country. However, it is not the UPA that initiated the thrust
for the information, communication and entertainment sectors. At best the UPA
did not negate the policies implemented by its predecessor National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) government.

The UPA was effective with its Mahatma
Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) and the National Food
Security Act. The Congress manifesto does not miss highlighting these
achievements: “At the turn of the millennium, we brought about a ‘Regime of
Rights’ marking a paradigm shift in India’s politics and development.”

Whenever it comes to environmental
discussions, there is a fact that every senior leader of the Congress party repeats
ad nauseam. They recall that Indira Gandhi was the only visiting prime minister
who participated in the 1972 United Nations Conference on Human Environment
held in Stockholm, Sweden. This statement is repeated, once more, in the
Congress manifesto.

There is certainly historicity in the
statement about Indira Gandhi. But then, she was also the person who decided
that conserving the rain forest in Silent Valley was more important than
submerging it for hyrdro-electric power. The Project Tiger was launched during
her premiership, and she had also sown the seeds of the Coastal Regulation Zone
notification.

Hidden behind this near-platitudinous
reference to Indira Gandhi is the state of the Congress-led UPA’s environmental
record in the past 10 years. The report card part in the manifesto talks about
the establishment of the National Green Tribunal and the National Action Plan
on Climate Change.

The action plan for 2014-2019 states that
it will put water conservation in its actions on agriculture, rural and urban
development; provide clean cooking fuel across the country; launch Green
National Accounts by 2016-17; conserve biodiversity; and engage tribals and
forest dwelling communities in the management of forests and share with them
benefits from forest produce.

Whatever be the promises, voters assess them
against past performance. And this is more so for the party that has led the
national government for a decade. Thus two sentences – one a promise, other an
achievement – in different parts of the manifesto, sum up much of the
environmental controversies that the UPA faced during its two consecutive
terms.

The promise states, “We envision an India
where power would have been devolved to the grassroots and the marginalised so
that they can shape their own destiny.” And, the achievement states, “Today,
coal production is 554 million tonnes per year. Ten years ago it was 361
million tonnes per year.”

Though not limited only to coal, the most
contentious environmental disputes during the UPA period were related to
mining, where the interests of the industry were strongly perceived to hurt the
interests of the local and forest communities. It came to a head when 12 gram
sabhas turned down the proposal by Vedanta Resources for bauxite mining in
Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha.[i]

On matters related to environment the UPA
has been like one of the cars they use in driver training schools that have two
sets of controls – one for the student and the other for the trainer. While the
political lightweight prime minister attempted to take the car in one
direction, there was a reverse pull from the other set of controls handled by
Sonia Gandhi.

At least two environment ministers – Jairam
Ramesh and Jayanthi Natarajan – operated in the space created by these two
pulls. Environment clearance for projects were delayed, and at times denied.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confirmed to a group of editors in June 2011 that
he has been pressurising Ramesh. Singh quoted Mahatma Gandhi, “As Gandhiji said,
poverty is the biggest polluter. We need to have a balance.”[ii]
Singh attempted to change this with the proposal for the establishment of a
National Investment Board (NIB).[iii] The
proposal did not materialise.

The idea of the NIB is not dead, though.
It has resurfaced as the proposal for a National Environmental Appraisal and
Monitoring Authority “to conduct rigorous and time-bound environmental
appraisals and recommend environmental clearances where appropriate in a
time-bound and transparent manner.” It is not known if the repeated emphasis on
“time-bound” is intentional or not.

Delays in getting clearances hurt
investment and in turn the investment climate. True. The need for a transparent
and time-bound process can also not be disputed. But the two preceding
questions are: how seriously are environmental impacts of projects assessed,
and how carefully does the government listen to the voice of the community
during public hearings? The UPA’s record has not been very reassuring on this
front. Or else there would not have been so many environmental controversies
during the past 10 years.

Since the press meeting I attended at CLRI two decades ago, Manmohan Singh completed one term as finance minister and later had two full terms as prime minister. The economy too grew at above the promised 7% (the manifesto claims that the average for the last 10 years was 7.5% economic growth). So history did not deny him the opportunity to turn his words into action. The results of the coming elections, especially from the constituencies that have had environment- and livelihood-related disputes, will show what people think of his government’s action or inaction.

Tuesday, 25 March 2014

In March 2012, President Anote Tong of Kiribati, an archipelago nation in the Pacific, informed international journalists that his Cabinet has endorsed a plan to buy 6,000 acres on Fiji's main island. This was not for real estate speculation, but for more humanitarian reasons. The land in Fiji would help Tong's government to repatriate its citizens if sea level rise due to climate change was to submerge the Kiribati islands. ...MORE ...

Sunday, 23 March 2014

The National Alliance of People’s
Movements (NAPM) has joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to fight the Indian
general elections 2014. The NAPM leader and environmental activist Medha
Patkar’s name was announced in the first list of the AAP candidates. She would
contest from Mumbai North-East.

This is the first time that the NAPM or
any well-known environmental activist group is joining electoral politics. The
environmental and social activists took the decision to join the AAP at NAPM’s
national meeting in January this year. While some of the NAPM leaders have
agreed to be immersed in the AAP’s national election process completely, others
will play a more supportive role.

Satellite image of the Sardar Sarovar dam
and reservoir on the Narmada river. The NAPM grew out of the environmental
movement against the construction of the dam.

This means that a coalition of 222
environmental and grass-roots groups have aligned themselves to the youngest
political party in the country that formed and dismembered the government in
Delhi state and has ambitions in national elections.

The marriage also means that if AAP were
to become a part of any coalition that forms the government after the national
elections then the NAPM would be part of the “State establishment”. This becomes
a point for comment since the environmental movements had been fighting the
State and the establishment for decades.

There is a certain degree of synergy
between the AAP and the NAPM – after all both came into being as a network of
protestors. Both have also reached a stage in their growth where they have
realised that there is a limitation to the politics of protest, and to be effective
there is need to transition into the parliamentary democracy process (though in
Delhi, the AAP entered and exited this process).

However, the critical difference is in
the constituencies they represent.
While the AAP represents the urban middle class, the NAPM represents
communities in the hinterlands such as tribals, artisanal fishermen, labourers,
mineworkers, etc. The AAP’s constituents are predominantly in the consuming end
of the economic spectrum, whereas those of the NAPM are in the producing end.

Though contesting within a city, Patkar’s
constituency has slums and she was active earlier fighting for the rights of
the urban poor from these tenements.

The AAP is a political party that,
theoretically, was in the making since the launch of the economic
liberalisation in 1991. When the markets were liberalised, there was an intense
focus on the middle class, especially those in the urban centres, as consumers
for goods and services. Higher disposable incomes, a sense of ownership in the
corporate world through shares, access to foreign brands in local stores, shopping
malls and food courts; for the first time since Independence, the urban middle
class felt a sense of self-importance.

They had decades of accumulated
complaints against the politicians and the bureaucracy. They protested against
corruption and poor governance, but did not have a political vehicle to give
strength to their voice. The AAP gave the urban middle class a political voice.

This is the political voice that the AAP
used to do well in the elections in Delhi, a predominantly urban state. Aware
of its limitation, AAP did not try to contest in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh or
Chhattisgarh. Now that the AAP has ambitions for the national elections, an
alliance with the NAPM can broaden their base.

The NAPM, on the other hand, is an
alliance of grass-roots organisations that had come into being to protect the
natural resources from the villages from being hijacked for urban and
commercial use. The prime mover for the NAPM was the Narmada Bachao Andolan
(NBA) that fought against the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the
1990s. The National Alliance was established before the 1996 general elections,
when NBA wanted to give a pan-India presence to its anti-dam movement by networking
with other environmental organisations.

The idea of the NAPM joining the AAP is
fraught with contradictions. For instance, while contesting for the Delhi
assembly elections, the AAP’s initial promise was to give water supply to all
in the state, including free supply of 700 litres per day per household.
Obviously, the water comes from outside the city. Also, some communities
outside the city that have lost out their natural resources for the
establishment of power plants are contributing to the reduction of power costs
by half for consumers in Delhi.

One of the strong statements that came
from the residents in the Garhwal districts who lost their lands and water
resources to the Tehri dam was “why should we suffer and allow our water be
taken to New Delhi to be flushed in toilets?” Tehri dam’s height was fixed at 260
metres because of its potential to generate power. This in turn submerged more
land.

And this is where the catch would come.
Can Delhi’s need for water be met without compromising the needs of village
communities outside the state? If Delhi’s interests are protected at the cost
of the hinterlands then the NAPM would be seen as moving away from its core
beliefs. If the interests of the rural communities are met at the cost of
Delhi, the AAP may become unpopular with its primary constituency.

It is interesting that the NAPM that
steadfastly stayed away from electoral process is joining it in 2014. Moving
into the political process will help the Indian environmental movement. There
are two reasons for this. One, they can more effectively follow up on their
demands. Two, it will also give them an understanding of the multiple pressures
that the executive feels from different sections of the society. Being outside
and objecting is different from being inside and ensuring that people’s
concerns are built into policy and action.

The marriage with the AAP is also an
opportunity for the NAPM to come back into national consciousness. While the
economic, political and social processes in the past two decades led to the
formation of the AAP, it also led to the marginalisation of movements such as
the NAPM. The urban middle class was too busy focusing on its consumption needs
to worry about environmental impacts of its actions.

This, however, is only part of the reason
that the NAPM got marginalised in the national consciousness. The
environmentalists also did themselves in by their shrill and unrelenting
positions on many development projects and their refusal to engage in any kind
of negotiations.

The NAPM had slipped out of the media
radar in the recent years. The Alliance leader Medha Patkar, who was frequently
interviewed by the media in the early 1990s, hardly makes a token presence in
the present-day TV talk shows, grabbing a few minutes of attention
sporadically. Her last appearance of significance was during the protest
against the establishment of the Tata Motors plant in Singur, West Bengal, in
2007-08.

As with all good marriages, the coming
together of the AAP and the NAPM has benefits for both. The question is will it
last?

There can be two prognoses. It could lead
to a positive engagement hitherto not seen in the Indian environmental
discussions, and thereby reinvigorate the process. Or, in a matter of time the
NAPM will come out of its alliance with the AAP and become its critic from
outside.

The second is an easy option. The first
requires work where issues of convergence have to be strengthened and personal
egos kept aside.